ALAN FILREIS

This essay was published in Review, volume 17 (1995): 155-69.
Please quote from the paper version.

A hard and indelible fact of freedom is that a conformity of
sorts is
always dominant....[T]he freeman's principal concern is that it
shall be a conformity that honors the values he esteems
rather than those he rejects.
--William F. Buckley and L. Brent Bozell in McCarthy and His
Enemies

Saul Bellow was surely right when in May of 1994 he noted for a
New Yorker writer that the culture wars of the nineties have their
rhetorical and logical origins in the fifties--in the "super-charged
battles between anti-Communists and anti-anti-Communists."<3> I take
this cue (though little else, I'm afraid) from Mr. Bellow. He is
right to imply that while so much has been said and written about
political correctness in the eighties and nineties, little has been
done to put the debates in the context of anticommunism. Though
Bellow believes anti-anticommunists were largely influenced by
Stalinism--here's where, unsurprisingly, he parts with the left--he
does concede that what little anti-anticommunist resistance there was
in the 1950s arose because some liberals didn't enjoy "being forced to
line up" in the rush to consensus.<4> To Bellow those who in the late
forties and fifties fashioned liberal anticommunism (those who did
"line up"--Bellow scornfully says many indulged in "opinion-
consumerism"<5>) had earlier been the not-altogether happy
participants in the Popular Front, New Deal Democrats among them.
More interesting is Bellow's notion that those who formed anti-
anticommunism had been either outright communists earlier, or
liberals whose liberalism became "liberal fanaticism" when in the
1950s they refused to participate in McCarthyism. These anti-
anticommunists, Bellow suggests, are the principal forerunners of
advocates of "political correctness" forty years later. Bellow sees
in contemporary liberalism a radicalism of people stuck on slogans,
labels and rigidified positions ("mindless...medallion-
wearing...placard-bearing" folks), and evidently he deems this group
more properly the inheritors of anti-anticommunist Stalinism than of
anticommunist liberalism--as if the latter ideology did not have an
ideology, had no slogans, bore no placards. This PC genealogy is the
key, I think, to discerning the positions taken in the newest outbreak
of culture wars. PC bashers inherit from the fifties the
anticommunists' assumption that the most powerful anti-anticommunists
are Stalinists-become-"liberal fanatics," while anti-PC bashers
inherit from the fifties the anti-anticommunists' assumption that the
most powerful anticommunists are liberals become more truly
themselves. At issue, primarily, is which group gets to claim as its
rightful heritage from the cold-war era the notion that intellectual
and social culture benefit from radical dissensus, disagreement, and
difference. Yet in the fifties almost every anticommunist at one
point or other argued *against* dissensus for the sake of the
necessarily greater disagreement with Soviet (or "world") communism
(e.g. limits on the right of American communists to teach in the
universities, for the sake of national security), while, even if only
for strategic reasons, the anti-anticommunists were the ones
incessantly arguing for the right (indeed the usefulness) of radical
dissent, including that of communists.

Although Gerald Graff, as he wrote *Beyond the Culture Wars: How
Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education*, was surely
aware of a cold-war context for his contention that, for instance,
intellectual extreme opposites "need" each other to make their
positions meaningful,<6> it was never his purpose to make his argument
depend on that awareness. Yet *Beyond the Culture Wars* would benefit
from such dependence, and since, moreover, so much has been written
about Graff's book since its publication in 1992 in relation to the
political correctness, canon revision and multiculturalism
controversies,<7> I intend here to concentrate on restoring what I
take to be the crucial though perhaps necessarily unspoken cold-war
background to Graff's proposal. The fifties' relevance to what Graff
nicely calls "teaching the conflicts" reveals both the value of
Graff's insights about the cultural resistance to intellectual many-
sidedness and the limitations of a liberal pedagogical idealism that
is trying too hard to avoid the old communist-anticommunist contest.
Despite what I take to be implicitly his acuity about the effects of
cold-war consensus on the universities, and of red-baiting on
intellectual culture at large,<8> his promotion of an argument-
counterargument structure to literary education too often neglects the
fact that equal-time liberalism has a cultural precondition rendering
free and open colloquy not so easily made free and open. Graff would
say (rightly, I think) that the precondition must itself be taught,
but the resulting meta-pedagogical involution, however boldly self-
conscious, is not without its own politics.

Fifties-style obliviousness abounds among anti-PC partisans. When
John Silber recently celebrated Boston University's success in
"resist[ing] relativism" and, in its English department, having "not
allowed the structuralists or the deconstructionists to take over,"
while claiming that Western culture invented multiculturalism
(thereby, evidently, freeing B.U. from having ever to engage in
it),<9> he was borrowing heavily from the nationalist, counter-
imperialist rhetoric of 1950s anticommunism (despite his claims of
libertarianism). Similarly, Bellow's remarks for the *New Yorker* on
New York's cultural decline in 1994--"walking up and down Broadway is
like strolling through some foreign writer's invention of an American
slum"--re-express his bitter satire of 1951 against the
multiculturalist imagination in "Looking for Mr. Green," a short story
that originally appeared in *Commentary*,<10> in which an over-
qualified deliverer of welfare checks (an unemployed university
professor) is duped by his liberalism into thinking that a Chicago
slum isn't as foreign and impenetrable as deepest, darkest Africa.
What useful intellectual purpose could possibly be served by an
academic's foolish desire to know this outlandish place as an American
place? What appalling multiculturalism would then or now insist,
despite the utter truth about cultural centrality, that all of us,
even those who abhor this professor's craving for culture-crossing, be
forced against our wills to certify as legitimate cultural expression
what's now along Broadway? My point is that Graff in *Beyond the
Culture Wars* does very much want to certify it, and yet because he is
so keen to stand reasonably in the middle, beckoning opposite academic
sides to instructive colloquy about what constitutes culture, he tends
to underemphasize his own passionately held position against Bellow's.
As Bellow's is an exclusivist concept, it is built to defy inclusion.
The "politically independent" Bellow who shrewdly summons up the
anticommunist years when he speaks about the folly of the
multiculturalists is the same urban lyricist who is disgusted by
Broadway's cultural melange--is the very same PC basher who has
challenged the contemporary literary-critical left to show him the
Tolstoy of the Zulus.<12> Graff is taking an inclusivist position

The "politically independent" Bellow who
shrewdly summons up the anticommunist years when he speaks about
the folly of the
multiculturalists is the same urban lyricist who is disgusted by
Broadway's cultural melange--is
the very same PC basher who has challenged the contemporary
literary-critical left to show
him the Tolstoy of the Zulus.

*against* this when he calls for curricular openness--when, for
instance, he urges teachers of Joseph Conrad to put *Heart of
Darkness* alongside Chinua Acebe's *Things Fall Apart*, even though
Graff would like his right-wing readers to be assured that he is
standing *between* Bellow and someone *other* left dogmatist who is
only prepared, in response to the right, to read from his
underprivileged Zulu Tolstoy. The inclusivist position meets its
limit just where the exclusivist begins. The allusions to fifties-
style culture wars here are meant to show how at such moments Graff
risks falling into the trap of the cold-war liberal who in the face of
McCarthyism called for dialogue but in doing so forgot to supply the
substantive counterargument against anticommunist consensus itself,
and thus judged the American ideal of inclusivity to be ideologically
transcendent (in "beyond"-arguments that were really efforts to escape
political debate) rather than a value constructed by serious-minded
conflict. It was insufficient then, and it is insufficient now, to
argue only or primarily against consensus itself.

To be sure, *Beyond the Culture Wars* expends its greatest
efforts making a lucid, positive case for the value of serious-minded
conflict, and this is its important aspect. If American students have
been socialized to agree, then a pedagogical structure based on
disagreement provides a means by which they can gain a sense of what
is at stake in the cultural controversies raging around them. He is
right that the alternative is ignorance in the name of "the basics."
If, as Graff puts it, "such conflict seems vaguely un-American" (p.
5)--a nice and apt recollection of fifties rhetoric--then a pedagogy
serving as a reminder, so simple as to seem unnecessary, that
democratic traditions include debate about values most dearly held
seems warranted. To leave our students out of unresolved discussions
of these controversies is to foster an unreality Graff properly
decries, an unreality that, especially in literature courses, causes
an unfortunate association between great books and wholly resolved
problems. One mistake of traditional pedagogy was to conceive of
schools as places where disagreements about the curriculum were
already resolved before the opening class bell rang, which was the
moment when disagreement ended and agreement began. "The history of
higher education is a succession of stormy conflicts that have
produced the curriculum but are rarely addressed in it" (p. 125). In
Graff's meta-pedagogy, teaching these disagreements themselves can
disclose for students the not-so-mystical process by which culture is
made, sustained, challenged, and recreated. It is hard to know (Graff
supplies only personal middle-class recollection) if Americans overall
have been harmed by the traditional mode in which they are presented
with the results of
their teachers' conflicts rather than given a
chance to participate in resolving them (p. 12); anyway, critics of
this orientation to process are surely wrong to argue that it entails
unproductive disrespect for cultural achievements. Teaching in the
way Graff recommends does not in itself encourage educational impasse.
We do no honor to the literary classics
"by protecting them from
disrespect" (p. 48) and, similarly, we do no honor to our students by
shielding them from our own contentious positions.

So Graff reasonably and rightly wants his students to see that
everyone, even (or especially) their teachers, is of necessity a side-
taker. The trouble is--and Graff is mostly aware of it as he
describes the problems and possibilities of pedagogical subjectivity--
one side usually delineates the sides, leaving the other side to argue
its side *as well as* against the delineation of the sides. Thus,
again, by virtue of his very argument about positions (against which
William F. Buckley might well say: "Does he mean there are *sides* to
take on Shakespeare's greatness? This seems a waste of time"), Graff
implicitly concedes what his book might have made clearer with a
glance back to the origins of this dispute: the sides have been drawn
by the right as descendents of the first anticommunist intellectuals,
the same participants in the debate who once deemed the idea that
there were *sides* in discussions of American democracy a form of
treason and who then and now would similarly deny the very relevance
of side-taking in, say, the study of great books. One of the few
weaknesses of anti-anticommunist Robert Maynard Hutchins--but this
weakness was enough to render him mostly powerless--was that he did
not discern this basic strength of anticommunism. Scholars of
Hutchins's fascinating career as university president, think-tank
impresario, educational reformer, tend to ascribe this to a
temperamental naivete, but that's just my worry: the inadequacy of
Hutchins's conversation about the Great Conversation, his position on
position-taking, was intrinsic to his situation as a liberal. At the
University of Chicago and then at the Fund for the Republic, Hutchins
truly thought that by advocating advocacy he was in a position to
redraw the lines (and terms) of the debate. For most anticommunists
of the fifties, Hutchins's ardent promotion of dialogue and
"conversation"--the interanimations of a variety of positions, as in
Hutchins's Great Books program--meant little more or less than
communism, or at the very least a submission to communism, which was
in effect communism. Volunteer anticommunist operatives sent
professional red-baiters reports on Great Books discussion groups from
across the country. One women from Tulsa, having infiltrated a group
there, described a session on "The Declaration of Independence,"
alarmed that the group operated like a communist cell (they picked
apart the text line by line, and "Only the leader could ask questions
but he himself could not be questioned"). "Through it all," she
wrote, "the seed of World Government was cleverly planted.... It was
all very confusing--purposely done, of course."<13> What really
unnerved anticommunists yearning to see red in Hutchins was his
refutation of the idea that teachers know and give answers, and his
promotion of lively discussion in which "sharp differences of opinion
lends interest to everyone"--a point (which in context was once thus
an anti-anticommunist one) essential to Graff. The reactionary
columnist Fulton Lewis, preparing an attack on Great Books, marked (in
red) the following statements in a Great Books pamphlet advising
discussion leaders: "Never Answer, Never Tell, Never Lecture, Never
Sum Up--Never!" and "A good discussion is always on the edge of
chaos." The anticommunist backlash against lively discussion (when,
as with the "Declaration," straight answers seemed to do just fine) is
only one indication that during the cold war the lexicon of side-
taking in the United States changed--and changed, I would suggest, in
a way that is still with us forty years later. Although the
anticommunist rhetoric of opposition required self-conscious
positioning against an alien ideology (and thus against ideology
itself), the anticommunist side held two-thirds of the ground. In a
speech of 1950, George E. Sokolsky, a reactionary columnist, described
Marxism as "[t]he principal problem that faces most men today" and
asked: "Shall we be for it? Shall we oppose it? Shall we make
compromise with it?" Sokolsky meant of course that to compromise with
it was the same as being for it. For decent folks the only position
remaining was opposition, and it was actually no position at all but
the utter truth, the only place worth standing. In such a sense of
"opposition," nothing of the interplay and understanding between ideas
was actually being urged (in spite of momentary deference to the
rhetoric of "for...against...[or] make compromise"). One side had
truth (Sokolsky's title was "The Peace of Truth: The Bulwark against
Marxism") and the other side lured one into evil mediation,
negotiation, "compromise." The proof, he suggested, was to be found
not just in the arguments of communists but also in "endorsements [by
others] *relating* to Communist *objectives*" (emphasis added) where
one found "distinguished names" of noncommunists making "compromise"
with communism and thus aiding its spread. So mediation was not a
position. It is no accident that Sokolsky's speech was so brazenly
anti-intellectual ("The man whose instinct is for learning and for
truth needs no university at all"), and I would suggest that its
occasion--the raising of St. Bonaventure College to the status of a
University--was precisely what caused Sokolsky to insist that the
rhetoric of intellectual exploration of opposites is a sham.<16>

Given this history of anti-positionality (and a parallel history
of anti-intellectualism), Graff's proposals for pedagogical position-
taking, while sound in particular aspects, can strike one as not
likely to "Revitalize American Education" in the sense he means. Graff
suggests repeatedly that in the classroom (as elsewhere) an effort to
present the pros and cons on any controversial question is itself
always some measure of relief from indoctrination. (As an avid though
sometimes very doubtful teacher-of-the-conflicts myself, I do feel I
provide such relief, but my keenest students remind me that it's
possible to be indoctrinated to differ and disagree, having been
liberated from accord and agreement.) Again the raising of consensus
to the highest plane of values in the fifties might have taught us
that there are sides and there are sides; Graff's notion too
trustingly, I think, assumes of all parties a liberal-centrist
conscientiousness in the very definition of what constitutes "the
other side" of a question--an intellectual fairmindedness that had
been lost or in any case was absent during the previous era of
McCarthyism. One of the most relentlessly reactionary magazines of
that time was Dan Smoot's *Facts Forum* of Dallas, funded by the
billionaire anticommunist H. L. Hunt. Smoot's magazine published
nothing that did not shore up one and only one side of the communist
question (which was the defining question), and yet Smoot's general
appeal used the rhetoric of teaching the conflicts, superficially much
like Graff's. Like any hear-both-sides liberal, the reactionary
Smoot--a Harvard PhD in English literature, and lit instructor-turned-
FBI agent--argued that an informed citizenry is a more powerful weapon
than even "the army" in the defense of cultural values held dearly.
But what constitutes being informed, and indeed what constitutes
information? Another way of formulating the question gets at the heart
of Graff's proposal: how far from one's own side must one go before
one can be deemed fairly presenting the other? In a letter of 1952
addressed "Dear Americans," Smoot noted, "The Facts Forum News will
carry a summary of pro and con arguments on current questions from the
Facts Forum polls."<15> But having read the whole run of *Facts
Forum*, I well understand, as Smoot's conservative readership surely
did, the specifically limited sense of "con" here--a sense that did
not need to be articulated to be understood. If "pro" meant, for
example, firing immediately and without a hearing all public school
and public university teachers whose ideas happened to coincide with
the communists', "con" might mean firing immediately and without a
hearing only those who are identified as card-carrying communists
while permitting the fellow-travellers maybe a little time to assemble
a legal defense.

My point is that in the earlier era of culture-warring,
reactionaries and other cultural transcendentalists rarely spoke
against the idea of hearing all sides of a debate on contemporary
issues; some did, to be sure, but most did not, believing themselves
to be advocates, in the schools and universities, of the *fully*
informed student. Yet it didn't take much before the same
anticommunists who urged, in their own terms, the equivalent of
teaching the conflicts, cried foul against ideological opposites,
latter-day anti-anticommunists like Graff--those who took the right's
rhetoric of free debate seriously and zealously called for the same.
Luella Mundel, an untenured professor of Art History at Fairmont State
College, who was *not* a communist (before being red-baited she had
been almost wholly apolitical), was called a Red and then dismissed
from her job pretty obviously because she was an outspoken single
modern woman teaching modern ideas in a small college town--because of
her urban manner and the appreciation for modern art she conveyed in
her art history classes. Mundel's attorney, Horace Meldahl, made the
dreadful mistake of saying in a newspaper interview published just
before the beginning of Mundel's trial that he hoped she would get a
fair hearing, that the idea of free association and speech would be
upheld, and that he shared with most Americans the desire to air both
sides of the debate about communism. This assertion was, as a
chronicler of the Mundel affair has noted, "about as subversive as a
high-school civics text," but nonetheless Mundel's detractors at
Fairmont State, and the local citizens of Fairmont, went wild with
fury. A fair trial for Professor Luella Mundel became an
impossibility in a community of enraged anticommunists after her
attorney publicly advocated teaching the conflicts.<17>

Graff does worry about the political insularity of his proposed
reforms, and here is where his book is at its best. In a section on
"The Course Fetish" he describes the damaging myth of the course as a
haven from the mundane, bureaucratic aspects of big university (and
even small college) existence, "a garden occupying a redemptive
space," "a realm of unity and presence in a world otherwise given over
to endless difference, conflict, competition, and factionalism" (pp.
116-17). Obviously he wants to provide an intellectual field of
indefinite boundaries where that very disunity and conflict can become
necessarily part of the university's intellectual and not just its
bureaucratic life--which might have the effect of intellectualizing
the bureacracy a bit, and may also allow the university's bureaucratic
culture to permeate the course. (That Graff would not mind the latter
effect sets him apart from most of those fighting the culture wars.)
Graff is arguing strongly for the integration of what goes on in the
classroom and what goes on everywhere else at the university. Put in
this way, his integrationist notion is not in itself likely to be much
disputed--indeed it sounds like the liberal-artsy lesson about "living
and learning" to be drawn from college catalogue covers. But since
Graff makes this argument specifically in the context of his
refutation of the conservative's (inexpensive) idea "that there is
nothing wrong with today's education that cannot be cured by getting
good teachers together and simply turning them loose" (an education
wonk's truism from the Reagan years), it is very contentious indeed,
for it powerfully contradicts the vision of the great teacher offering
singular redemption in a removed, redemptive space, and is in effect a
call to teachers-of-the-conflicts to expose values under construction
around the university just as in the classroom (pp. 116-17). This
more than anything else in *Beyond the Culture Wars* raises what the
intellectual right sees as the spectre of leftist professors imposing
their Zulu Tolstoys in "dialogue with" Tolstoy on unsuspecting
"nonpolitical" professors just trying to teach Tolstoy by himself.
Graff's position is more fervently *one* of the positions than his
argument about positionality permits him at most points to reveal.
When he does not reveal it, his book is less directly and less
forcefully an argument against its culture-wars forebearers, such as
Felix Wittmer's *Conquest of the American Mind: Comments on
Collectivism in Education* (1956), E. Merrill Root's *Collectivism on
the Campus: The Battle for the Mind in American Colleges* (1955), and
Buckley's *God and Man at Yale* (1951), the last a less well-argued
book than Graff's but in odd ways similar. Buckley, too, "dissociated
myself from the school of thought . . . that believes teachers ought
to be 'at all times neutral'"--so as to enable his argument that Yale
ought to repudiate its relativist, secularist and "collectivist"
curriculum, which it pretended was non-ideological.<18> To break what
he saw in 1951 as the liberal orthodoxy at the university--an
extraordinary and nearly paranoid vision--Buckley knew he could depend
on a politically honest pedagogy that would "Let the student and
citizen witness the struggle" and "Let the struggle take place in
their minds." And note that Buckley means these principles *not* to
"justify laissez-faire education" but rather to foster an activist one
that would instigate curricular cross-comparisons (which for him
inevitably meant the refutation of any discipline not absolutist).<19>
When "[t]he wife of a prominent professor" told young Buckley that
"Yale ought to have a course on Communism, and this course should be
taught by a man who is neither pro-Communist [n]or anti-Communist,"
Buckley found this anti-positionality dishonest and was instantly
reminded of Richard Weaver's definition of a liberal as "someone who
doubts his premises even while he is acting upon them."<20> Though
in truth Buckley would have been the first to decry a course at Yale
on communism taught by a "pro-Communist"--indeed, he would have
reported it, as he did much else, directly to the FBI<21>--the point
of *God and Man at Yale* was nonetheless that universities should
*not* fear confirmed pedagogical position-taking ("Let the student
witness the struggle") and should avoid the liberal allure of both-
sidedness. At its weakest Graff's book paints a picture of an
innovative teacher confirming Weaver's image of liberalism; at its
strongest it substantiates that the endless fights against conformity
at universities will be waged by people with contending notions of
conformity, but now, perhaps, in the name of permitting in the
classroom itself the other side's say. This to me is a prospect much
less hopeful than Graff would want to suggest in his otherwise
optimistic book, and unfortunately similar to Buckley's cold-war axiom
about conformity being an indelible fact of freedom.

And what of the classroom as sacred, redemptive space? Is this
false redemption offered only by the traditional great teacher using
traditional concepts of pedagogy and of the university? In courses
taught effectively by teachers of the conflicts, is there no chance of
producing a space equally redemptive in its way? A realm of unity
based on the agreement to disunite for the sake of invigorated,
engaged learning? This may well lead to an ironic psychic doubling of
the course fetish. A revitalizing myth of unity based on the
preeminence of the values of unity, consensus, and undividededness--
fifties-style--is not *necessarily* more honest than a revitalizing
myth of nineties-style unity based on the preeminence of disunity,
dissensus, and fragmentation.

NOTES

1. I am grateful for permission from the following archives to quote
from unpublished materials: The Hoover Institution on War, Revolution
and Peace, Stanford University (for material in the *National
Republic* Papers); Special Collections Department at William R.
Perkins Library, Duke University (for material in the J. B. Matthews
Papers); and George Arents Research Library, Syracuse University (for
materials in the Fulton Lewis Sr. Papers).

2. Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, p. 120.

3. The phrase is not Bellow's but a *New Yorker* writer's paraphrase
of a point made during an interview ("Mr. Bellow's Planet," *New
Yorker*, May 23, 1994, p. 35).

8. In *Professing Literature: An Institutional History* (Chicago:
University of Chicago, 1987), Graff does not directly describe the
effect of anticommunist investigating committees on English department
faculty and programs, although it would have nicely paralleled his
point--one repeated in *Beyond the Culture Wars* (p. 153)--that
patriotism during World War I aided the rise of Great Books, said
later by many of its adherents to be founded on the eternal verities.
In the following passage Graff makes it clear that his narrative of
the rise of American Studies in the 1950s gives very little credence
indeed to leftists' claims against the "American Renaissance" concept
as delimited by cold war:

Whatever the[. . .] political failings [of cold-war-era
Americanists], there is something misplaced in the recent
tendency to assimilate the postwar theories of American
literature...to a "social control" model that makes Cold War
ideology, "disciplinary power," and "surveillance" so
pervasive that it empties these concepts of useful content.
In a curious kind of academic competition in which each
critic tries to establish himself by "out-lefting" all
others, the very concept of an "American Renaissance" is
reread as a mere rationalization of the Cold War..., the
interpretation of *Moby Dick* "in which Ishmael's freedom is
opposed to Ahab's totalitarianism" is interpreted as an
apology for American anticommunism.... (p. 223)

This unfairly insinuates that those who read the many democratic
narratives of the period as shaped by the strong cold-war consensus
are invariably allegiant to Foucault--and thus the imposition of a
latter-day "neo"-left theory upon the earlier left-to-right succession
is thought merely to continue the old endless fight of left versus
right. Thus here as elsewhere Graff's work implies a saner middle
ground. For a full study of the damage done by anticommunism at the
universities, see Ellen Schrecker, *No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism & the
Universities* (1986). Though Schrecker covers all academic
disciplines, her work with university archives points to as-yet
unanalyzed evidence suggesting distortions in the English curriculum
as one result of red-baiting. See also Lionel S. Lewis, *Cold War on
Campus: A Study of the Politics of Organizational Control* (New
Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1988).

14. George Arents Library, Syracuse University, Fulton Lewis Sr.
Papers, "Great Books" folder. The files gathered by anticommunist
investigators working for the *National Republic* magazine include a
great deal of material intended to prove that the Great Books Program
was communist-allied or -inspired (Hoover Institute). The FBI built
similar files. J. B. Matthews, a professional anticommunist witness,
submitted a report to the FBI noting that *The Daily Worker* "has
approvingly featured Dr. Hutchins['s] views on education several
times" (Special Collections, William R. Perkins Library, Duke
University, Matthews Papers, Box 612, Hutchins folder, "Robert M.
Hutchins," October 30, 1953).

Through his (and Mortimer Adler's) Great Books Program, Hutchins
could prominently insist on the idea that social and political
progress would come only through an understanding of differences
arrived at through "conversation" (one of his favorite words)--a
position that was interpreted by anticommunists as a sell-out to the
communists, tantamount to "peaceful coexistence." That Hutchins could
suggest the Great Books as a way in which American citizens could
teach themselves the skills necessary for doing what American
diplomats were *not* doing abroad--namely reaching, through
intercultural "conversation," a "minimum understanding" with those
whose ideology we find abhorrent--was itself an irritant to
anticommunists. The exploration of differences through the playing
off against one another of opposing positions was the theoretical
basis (for Hutchins if not as happily for Adler) of the program
Hutchins outlined in *The Great Conversation: The Substance of a
Liberal Education* (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1952), a work
meant both as a handbook for Great Books discussion leaders and as a
manifesto for an idealistic liberal pedagogy Hutchins mostly failed to
bring even to his own University of Chicago. "The liberally educated
man" had above all to be able to discern "distinctions and
interrelations" between various positions (p. 3); to achieve this, he
(or she--despite Hutchins's habitual use of the male pronoun, Great
Books discussion groups were designed to and did include many women)
must learn to see how culture is strengthened and reconstructed
(though not originally constructed) through dialogue. Ours might
ideally be a "Civilization of the Dialogue," argued Hutchins, if it
weren't for certain "citizens [he meant anticommunist congressmen]
constantly demanding the suppression of freedom of speech in the
interest of national security" (p. 61).